Pluriverse

Pluriverse: New and Selected Poems charts the life-work of the celebrated poet Ernesto Cardenal—“one of the world’s major poets” (Choice) and “the preeminent poet of Central America today” (Library Journal). Follow Cardenal’s poetic development across six decades, from the early exteriorismo poems and romantic epigrams of the early 1950s, to the increasingly spiritual and political verse he wrote as priest and activist (including his classic revolutionary documentary poem “Zero Hour”) to the shorter victory and ecology poems, and elegies to fallen Sandinistas, and on to the cosmic-mystical-scientific dimensions of his later work. “Here they are—” editor Jonathan Cohen writes in his Introduction, “to gladden your heart and enrich your soul.”

We were helped along, not to say spurred along, by the poetry of Ernesto Cardenal.

—Roberto Bolaño

There could hardly be a better introduction to Cardenal than Jonathan Cohen’s beautifully edited and really brilliant translations…. Cohen’s translations are so good you feel that the poems might have been written in English.

—Robert Hass, The Washington Post

Ernesto Cardenal is a major epic-historical poet, in the grand lineage of Central American prophet Rubén Darío.

—Allen Ginsberg

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New Directions was founded in 1936, when James Laughlin (1914–1997), then a twenty-two-year-old Harvard sophomore, issued the first of the New Directions anthologies. “I asked Ezra Pound for ‘career advice,’” Laughlin recalled. “He had been seeing my poems for months and had ruled them hopeless. He urged me to finish Harvard and then do ‘something’ useful.”